This week’s assignment was simple: make a flashlight. In discussing the assignment in class, our professor Ben Light somewhat jokingly suggested that you could “even make it out of this dry erase marker,” so I decided to do exactly that.
Here are the materials I used:
And here is a slideshow of the process.
Once I disassembled the marker, I realized that the two necessary AAA batteries to run the LED wouldn’t fit as neatly inside as I had hoped. So I reversed the end plug and inserted the button inside of it using a drill and some hot glue. Pulling the plug out was not as graceful as I had hoped, so it looks a little rugged. Here is a link to the on/off push buttons I got, by the way. On the other end (the cap end), I reamed out the cap to shape the light’s beam a little bit with a dremel tool.
From there I built it from the LED outward. I soldered the ground of the LED to an insulated solid wire, and then I made a little coil out of solid wire and soldered it to the positive end of the LED.
I added hot glue to keep the connections from shorting. Then I sanded the hot glue down with a dremel so it would still fit inside the tip end of the marker. The coils were inspired by your typical manufactured household flashlight. I made them by hand twisting them around other pieces of wire.
Once the LED and its connectors were in, I slid the batteries into the tube, and then I soldered the ground to one end of my switch. The other end of my switch I soldered to another coil (more of a paddle really) and it sat nicely on the negative end of my batteries.
Sealing the whole thing up was the hardest. I regret attempting to do it with hot glue, as it made it look irreparably shabby. In the end I ended up sealing it up with super glue. I regret not testing my circuit before committing to the physical design. The LED I was using requires 3 volts, so two batteries were a necessity. If I were to do this again I would check the circuit first and realize I would need different batteries to fit the circuit neatly inside the housing.
